On The Brink
by Snape's Nightie
Summary: Ten year old Severus is dying to enter the magical world. Eileen is glad to have left it. Isn't she? A Spinner's End drabble. Very mild language.


Two perspectives on the difference between the Magical World and the Muggle one. Just a drabble about Severus' life pre-Hogwarts. No abusive!Tobiases, unless you count the snoring.

Disclaimer: Characters and scenario based on the Harry Potter novels by JK Rowling. She owns the characters and situations, along with the hallowed few companies with permission to use them (Bloomsbury, Warner Bros. etc.) I am merely entertaining myself and hopefully those who read this site, making no claims of ownership and no money whatsoever. Thank you. x

…….

It was late February and Severus had not seen the sun for five months. Winter dragged on and on, settling so tenaciously inside his bones and his soul that he could barely remember being able to leave the house without the ritual of muffling every inch of his body against the chill. Hat, scarf, gloves, coat, boots, extra socks, thermal underwear, at least two pullovers – yet the cruel, icy wind still managed to blow irregular droplets of sleet in through the cracks in his seasonal armour.

He was willing to bet that wizards didn't have these problems.

A clever magic spell would surely be able to warm you up, or even stop the freezing rain which had been falling with varying levels of intensity for the last fortnight altogether. The possibilities offered by the existence of magic were endless, if only he were allowed to explore them properly. His hungry young mind was crackling with anticipation of the wealth of knowledge and power into which he would soon be initiated. He had always hoped there was more to life than the mundane world of Scoursby with its gossiping housewives, kids playing street cricket and unambitious menfolk wandering zombie-like between factory, betting-shop and pub. On his tenth birthday, Severus had discovered suddenly, wonderfully, that he had been right.

After years of being moaned at by his father, his mother had finally been pushed to the end of her tether by one single scathing put-down too many and had flung his dinner up the kitchen wall, pulled a thin piece of wood from the pocket of her apron and turned her husband into a jar of pickled cabbage.

Severus had fallen off his chair and backed away in terror.

"Put that in the fridge for me, darling," she instructed him nonchalantly, replacing her wand and turning back to the stove as though nothing had happened.

He did not know whether he was more shocked to have witnessed his Dad becoming a pound of sauerkraut or to hear his mother call him 'darling'. He gaped stupidly.

"Don't be tiresome, Severus. Your father will be fine. He just needs to…ah…cool down a bit," she turned a withering black glare on her son.

"You're a…a…" he had given up on reading improbable children's literature, where things like this happened all the time, years ago, but he was at a loss to explain this any other way. He stared from his mother to the jar and back again. There was only one word for it. He swallowed. "You're a witch," he stated in dismay.

A thin eyebrow rose scornfully.

"Yes," said Eileen. "Now, put your father in the fridge."

It was utterly frustrating to know that he was a wizard, capable of amazing, inexplicable feats of magic, but have to wait a year and a half before he would be able to begin. He could make the lights flicker when he was bored at school (which, as his teacher and the rest of his class consisted of complete dunderheads, was often) and once caused Ted Pickersgill's ice cream cone to fall in the sea by sheer will-power on a school trip to Scarborough, but these were petty triumphs. If his mother could effortlessly blast people into inanimate objects with her wand, why couldn't he change the world?

Trudging up Weaver's Way in his thick wrappings, Severus cursed the weather, cursed the winter and cursed the fact that Spinner's End was the furthest street away from Scoursby Primary. Everyone else would be at home, sprawled on their hearthrugs watching Thunderbirds by now, thawing themselves out. The chill would have been tolerable, he scowled, if only it had bothered to snow. Snow was beautiful, special. It changed the mundane into something breathtaking. Even the outside privy looked intriguing underneath six inches of snow. It also meant no school, as the pipes almost always burst and flooded the whole building, leaving the town's population of under-elevens with whole days to indulge in sledging, skating on the canal, snowball fights and other rare pleasures.

Turning left into Warp Street, the bitter north wind almost knocked him off his feet. His satchel flapped behind him and he had to clutch his school cap onto his head to stop it flying off. The only way he was going to cope with the final slog back to Spinner's End was with judicious use of his imagination.

Five minutes later, Eileen opened the back door to find her son sprawled on the step, tapping pathetically at the bottom of the door.

"What are you doing?" she sneered down her nose at him.

"I'm Scott of the Antarctic," he informed her, with the perfect seriousness of a child who was somewhere else altogether. "I had to eat my last husky outside Reverend Burns' house."

"Get in," she rolled her eyes. "It's not that cold anyway. Just wait until you have to sleep in the dungeons at Hogwarts!"

Severus scampered eagerly inside.

"What shift is Dad working?" he asked, tearing off his boots so he could press his sock feet against the bars of the gas fire in the back kitchen.

"The Loom and Shuttle shift," she informed him, spitting the name of the pub while automatically tugging him a few inches back from the dangerously hot grille.

"Ma? Tell me more about magic?"

It had been his constant refrain since Eileen's unfortunate burst of temper on his birthday. It was perfectly natural that he should be curious about the world he would be entering, but it still hurt to remember the suffering she had turned her back on when she married Tobias. Her life nowadays was no picnic – money was tight and the narrow walls of the little terraced house, identical to every other in the town, sometimes started closing in on her – yet the pressures were much fewer. Eileen had never been good about remembering the delicate system of etiquette for formal dining, spotting the latest fashion in robe-trims or any of the other traditional concerns of the wealthy, pure-blooded witch.

In Scoursby, life was harder, yet somehow easier. Society judged her by the cleanliness of her front step, the amount of times her husband got involved in brawls at the pub and whether or not there were holes in the elbows of her son's school pullover. She had far less trouble managing these definite targets. Toby's bad temper could make life difficult, but it was nothing like the public humiliation of being on the wrong end of Vivicia Malfoy's withering sarcasm.

She spread a slice of dull, square muggle bread with bramble jelly and cut it in half, handing one piece to Severus and taking a bite out of the other.

"What do you want to know this time?" she asked. Explaining some things made her irritable as she remembered what she was missing, but he needed to know. There was no reason for her sensibilities to make him to arrive at the testing-ground that was Hogwarts completely ignorant.

"Why do wizards sleep in dungeons?"

"Not all of them do. I was in Slytherin House, and our dormitories were underground."

"Why?"

"Because the castle is very old, and hundreds of years ago, Salazar Slytherin chose the dungeons for his special students."

"Why?"

"I don't know. Perhaps because he liked the peace and darkness."

"Did you?"

"Not particularly."

"Why?"

"Next question."

"How do you turn someone into pickled cabbage?"

"You will _not_ start cheeking you father, young man!"

"Or else the Moors Murderers will come and get me?"

"Yes."

"I'm not scared of them anymore. I could turn them into cabbage."

"Severus…"

"Well, I could. Couldn't I? If someone tried to kidnap me?"

"Yes, but…"

"Teach me?"

"That is difficult magic, Severus."

"I can do it. I'm the cleverest in the class!"

"And the most modest."

"What?"

"Don't say 'what', say 'pardon'. How about a spell to turn someone's bogies into bats?"

"Groovy!"

"Don't say 'groovy' say 'excellent'."

"Why?"

…….

Eileen lay alone in the double bed, listening to the neighbours' radio blaring through the wall, to her son muttering in his sleep in the next room, to the drunken men bewailing the disastrous football results below in the street.

"The referee were a right nasty bugger!" Wheezed someone. There were general murmurs of agreement, and a loud belch.

"Aye, couldn't tell his own arse from his elber, let alone whether that were offside!" said another voice, which Eileen recognised as Cadge Whitehouse.

"That were never bloody offside!" Protested the first speaker again.

Straining to see if she could hear Toby's voice among the babble, Eileen almost jumped when two doors down the terrace, a sash window was violently flung up and Mrs Whitehouse's throaty roar echoed through the freezing air.

"I'll thank you gents to mind yer language, at this time of night an' all! Yer should be ashamed of yerselves!"

There was an immediate chorus of hissing on the ground as the miscreants loudly tried to shush each other. Cadge piped up winningly.

"I'm sorry, Ruby, United lost the match and..."

"I'll give yer summat to be _sorry_ for, if yer not up these stairs in thirty seconds!" The answer rang out like an indignant foghorn. "And don't the rest of yer have homes ter go to? Who's that lying on the pavement?"

There was some shuffling, then a reluctant chorus of:

"Snape."

Eileen groaned and flung back the covers, scrabbling to find her slippers in the icy room as the confrontation continued outside.

"Well, don't just leave him there," shouted Mrs Whitehouse, her tone conveying that she probably had her hands on her hips. "Go and put him on Eileen's front step! Eileen, duck, are you awake?"

She tugged at her own window until it rose up with a screech, a blast of cold, foggy air hitting her in the face.

"Yes, I'm awake. I think most of Yorkshire is," she remarked dryly, nodding to Ruby, who laughed and tutted at the men, looking bleary and sheepish in their little huddle. On the other side of the road, another bedroom window opened with a bang.

"Is my 'Enry out there, wi' you lot?" shrieked Mrs Egsworth, a terrifying vision in night-cream and curlers, a bundle of blankets crying piercingly on her hip.

"I'm just tekkin' Toby home, love," explained 'Enry, earnestly.

"Well, once yer've took Toby home, yer can bring yerself home, can't yer?" The window slammed down again.

…….

Toby's snores could be heard throughout the little house, even from his exile on the settee, until Eileen cast a discreet silencing spell. All was quiet again, except for the telltale slight creaking of the stairs.

"Back to bed, Severus," she instructed firmly, without turning round.

"You magicked him quiet!" The boy had come down wrapped in his quilt, but his teeth were still chattering. "How do you do that?"

"Come along. Bed," she guided him back upstairs.

"Why don't you magick him sober, too?" Severus' eyes were wide with confusion.

"That's more difficult," she explained, too tired to get into more discussion tonight.

"And why don't you magick us warm? Or rich?"

Sighing, she unrolled him from the quilt and manoeuvred him back into bed in his room, which was always mysteriously warmer than the rest of the house. The time had come, she realised. When Severus was younger, she had to conceal the existence of magic from him in case he told classmates or teachers, but he was older now, and his endless questions would need answers. He had managed the bat-bogey hex on the third attempt, which was not remarkable until one remembered that he had never been taught spellwork and had been using someone else's wand. If he had that kind of power, he would need to know the responsibilities of wielding it. Horrific visions of the child's enemies ending up as jars of cabbage flashed through her mind.

She leaned down and kissed his forehead, which was furrowed with consternation as he thought up scores of new accusatory questions about her magical abilities.

"Would you like to come shopping with me on Saturday?" she asked, wishing that she didn't wish he was still too small to know these things.

"In Scoursby?" he pulled a face of disgust, not a fan of traipsing round the outdoor market with his Ma when the other boys were in the park kicking balls and getting filthy.

"No…"

"In Leeds?" he interrupted, with interest. The big city was unfathomably wondrous, Eileen knew, but nothing like what he was about to experience.

"No, in London," she smiled as his jaw almost hit the floor. "In the place where witches and wizards do their shopping. It's called Diagon Alley."

"Yes! Wow! Groovy!" he bounced up and down in bed. "Can I have a wand? How do we get there? Will they know I'm different? Does everyone know everyone else is a wizard? Is it bigger then Leeds? Who..?"

"We are going to buy you some books," she announced calmly, knowing this would transport her clever son to even greater heights of delight.

"Books on wizards?" he was almost hyperventilating with excitement. She leaned forward conspiratorially, speaking slowly in her most hypnotic, melodic voice.

"Books on everything you need to know," she smirked.

A pair of skinny arms flung themselves around her neck with the kind of unbridled joy Severus had not directed at her since the age of two. Tears burned behind her eyes. This should not be a treat, she realised, this is his birthright. In a sudden moment of clarity, she saw that she had been wrong to deny him her world, just because she had tired of it. He would get to school to find the next generation of bitchy purebloods were way ahead of him - in language, traditions and magical mannerisms, if not academically. She hugged him tightly with a mixture of guilt and dread.

It was not too late. There was a year and a half before he would board that train – if Dr Beeching had managed not to close down the Kings Cross-Hogsmeade line since her own schooldays – which was a long time for a bright child to absorb knowledge. Severus was the cleverest in his class at Scoursby Primary, probably in the whole school, in fact. If anyone could take on a whole new culture and understanding, it was her son.

"There will be lots to learn, Severus," she finally released him, letting her hair tumble in front of her face to hide her boiling emotions.

She wanted to add, _I'm sorry._ _Sorry I lied to you, sorry I pretended I was something I was not, sorry I raised you here, when things might have been different. I truly thought it was for the best. My little boy, it's very exciting now, but you will come to hate me for breaking away. I know this for a fact. I remember what they used to do to half-bloods in that castle, even the clever ones. Especially the clever ones. I failed you even before you were born by being a sulky, rebellious little girl. I'm so sorry._

"Thank you!" He beamed.

"Do not thank me." _Don't thank me for ruining your life, foolish boy._

"Well…what do you want me to say?" his brow creased again.

_Say you won't hate me, say you'll still visit me once you've seen the way my wealthy family live, say you won't let any shallow, immaculate Malfoys grind you into the dirt._

"Ma?" _Mother, it must be 'Mother' if you are to survive Slytherin House._

"I don't want you to say anything, Severus, I want you to _learn_," she turned away, ready to head down and put a monitoring spell on Toby in case he started choking in his stupor. On the third stair from the top, Severus' voice drifted from his room.

"I'll learn, Ma. I'm good at it," he said simply.

_You will have to be, my darling, _she thought, looking at the peeling paint on the cold staircase and the holes in the hall rug. _You will learn to hate everything you have known, myself included._

_And it is I who will have to teach you how._

Unseen by her sleeping husband, Eileen Prince, daughter of one of the grandest wizarding families in the country, stood in her tiny muggle sitting room and wept.

-------

AN: Dr Beeching: almost destroyed the national rail system and cut off many small communities in the sixties by closing down 'unproductive' stations and branch lines.

The Moors Murderers: Notorious child-killers (see Google. The reason no one in this country under the age of 40 is called Myra). Eileen uses them as a threat for what happens to little boys who don't eat their greens/won't go to bed/pick their nose etc. Sick, but effective.

Thanks for reading. A slice of my excellent home-made banana cake to anyone who reviews! x


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